Art of Letting Go Series

Part 10- How You Treat Your Self

Do people treat you badly?

By this I mean do you often feel mis-treated and hurt by other people’s actions, such as when they criticize, not respect or even not listen to us.

Following on from my article on Mirrors, the regular mis-treatment we experience by others can mirror back to us how we are possibly mis-treating our self. That is, their mis-treatment might be showing us that we are already mis-treating our self.

“People tend Not to treat us too Differently than the way we already reat our self”

That is, there is usually a handful of people in our life that will have a tendency to hurt us (usually unconsciously) in the same way we are already hurting our self.

For example, if we feel people do not respect us, this could show us that we are not respecting our self. Or if we feel people don’t seem to notice or care much about us, perhaps we don’t pay enough attention or take enough care about our self either.

It can be easy to fall into the victim role and blame the world for mis-treating us. As in my article on Blame, this doesn’t actually support us in clearing our pain but tends to prolong or even enhance it.

Instead a healthier approach would be to first investigate if we are hurting our self in the same way we feel others hurt us.

If we discover that we are mis-treating our self then the second step would be to uncover and clear any beliefs that drove us to mis-treat our self, which includes releasing emotional pain held by these beliefs. As we begin to process and clear our pain and negative beliefs, we can begin to notice how we treat our selves better as we have taken away the fuel (the beliefs) that drove us to mistreat ourselves. Examples of such self held beliefs could include ‘I am not good enough’, ‘I am not allowed to be happy’ or ‘I deserve to be punished’. As we begin to treat ourselves better we can begin to notice that other people start to treat us differently also.

Sometimes it may take a few extra words to the other person to let them know that their behaviour is hurtful and no longer welcomed, and as we have become clearer by releasing our old pain and beliefs, our message to the other will be better heard and they are more likely to favourably respond.

“Treat our self the way we want others to treat us”

In short, if we often feel hurt by the way others treat us, use this as an opportunity to check on how we are actually treating ourselves, for quite possibly we are mis-treating ourselves the same way others mis-treat us. The answer may not seem obvious at first, so allow ourselves time to honestly observe how we are actually treating ourselves.

For when we start treating ourselves the way we would like others to treat us, then indeed others will begin to treat us in the same favourable way, and for those who continue to mis-treat us, it will be easier to recognise it as their unhealthy behaviour and disentangle ourselves from it.